The advent of the information age has led to large industrial-scale installations of server computers to handle data known as server farms. A server farm or server cluster is a collection of computer servers typically maintained by an organization to supply server functionality far beyond the capability of a single machine. Server farms often consist of thousands of computers which require a large amount of power to run and to keep cool. Server farms are typically collocated with the network switches and/or routers which enable communication between the different parts of the cluster and the users of the cluster. Server computers and all related networking equipment are typically mounted on 19-inch racks in a server room or data center.
The performance of large server farms (thousands of server computers or more) is typically limited by the performance of the associated cooling systems. Computers in server farms run continuously and consume large amounts of electricity while producing heat. For this reason, a critical design parameter for both large and continuous systems tends to be performance per watt and dissipating heat more efficiently can improve this parameter.
Note that the same numbers are used throughout the disclosure and figures to reference like components and features.